Gorgon

By Joe Sudar

Argus Buros had removed his sunglasses long before dusk. He put them back on when he saw Cove House.

The white plaster focused the dying light like a magnifying glass. The other historic homes dotting Serifos's old coastal neighborhood were like soiled shirts in comparison to the bleached walls of his family home. If he wanted to bring radiance back to the Buros name, this was the right place to start.

“Please, Argus,” groveled Nicholas Demos behind him in their native Greek. “There are other places. You don't need this.”

Nicholas was an old friend and the family's long time lawyer, but he was wrong. Argus did need this. “Other places. The apartment in Athens? Gone. The house in Macedon? Sold. That,” he pointed to the glaring house, “paid.” He strode away, gravel crunching under his feet.

Nick crunched after him. “You can stay with me until you get back on your feet. Please Argus. No one in your family has lived in this house for a generation. You've barely even visited this town. You haven't heard the stories...”

Argus spun and squared up against the little man. “Get back on my feet? How? I'm an investor, Nicholas. There's nothing to invest in. Our country is broke. I'm broke too, but I'm smart enough to fix that. The witless fools running this nation are not, so when I'm finished being broke I'm leaving. This house will be my storage shed until I find a bigger one, then I'll sign it over to you and you can tear it down if you're so scared. Go. Home.”

He stomped up the drive, squinting behind his sunglasses. He cursed Nick, then cursed the sun for not falling fast enough, then cursed Nick again. There was enough to worry about without a gutless solicitor questioning every step.

First task: call the movers in the morning and get back half their fee. His boxes, strewn about like children's blocks, were all lumped in the entryway. He found a box marked with an X on every side. At least the idiots hadn't broken his wine glasses or the bottle of red he'd stowed for moving day. He un-corked, poured, and let the silky sulphates wash down his anger.

“Please,” came Nick's trembling voice. “I'm telling you it isn't safe. The movers charged hazard pay after just an hour in here. They said the air was bad.”

The fat old man's face shone with sweat. He squinted at his employer, hand raised against the glaring walls. Argus wasn't sure what set him off more: the cowardice, or that it had taken him all the way until his wine was poured to work up the courage for this confrontation.

“Run home, you pig,” Argus growled. “Now.”

Nick straightened up, mouth set under his scrunched up eyes. He looked in the moment less like a pig and more like a bull preparing to charge. But he charged out the door instead of at Argus.

The house showed expert craftsmanship all over: its frame was hand-cut wood, held together like jigsaws without a single nail. An open foyer greeted him with simple elegance and straight lines. Mosaic-decorated arches led from room to room. Red and blue hand-glazed tiles sat underfoot. All the features worked together as accents for the porcelain-white walls that had survived unchanged for centuries.

The white plaster grabbed at every speck of light available. Even under his electric lantern the house seemed to press against his eyes like the crush of deep water. The wine helped though. By the end of his first glass Argus was ready to start assembling the cheap Swedish shelves he'd gotten to replace the antique bookcases sold with his other home. It was all temporary. Just dues to be paid before he was on top again.

After his third glass he switched to swigging from the bottle, found the leather armchair where those shiftless movers had left it, and slumped into it. The familiar feather stuffing rose up to meet him, letting the tension out one limb at a time.

He tipped the bottle to the ceiling and thought of all the things that were left to do. Too much for any one man, except him. He was the last Buros, and that would mean something very soon. His eyes itched from the strain of the day and he rubbed at gunk in their corners.

Why no lights? Why had no one in the family ever installed lights? Argus burst out of the chair, enraged at his family for keeping the house in the nineteenth century. Someone had been here in the sixties, surely they must have tried to install something modern.

The kitchen still had a wood stove. All the doors were locked with old warded locks and heavy bronze keys. Even the water came from a well outside. In order to install infrastructure, they would have had to get into the walls. The best place to do that would be one of the closets.

Sure enough, he wasn't the first one to have the idea. In the bedroom closet there was a hole in the wall, jagged as though made with a hammer. Crude, and nothing to show from it but an unsightly mess. The wine coursed in his blood, raising the same anger that he'd felt at Nick's cowardice. Why have a house like this if no one would value it? He would finish it. Argus Buros would be the one to make this house the capital of his family.

He tore through boxes until he found his toolbox and saw. Back at the hole, he set to work, evening it out until it looked like work instead of destruction. He threw pieces behind him and his saw kicked bursts of plaster dust into the air. The white dust caked onto his face. He wiped his brow and his hand came away white. He breathed and felt the sharp bite of dust, coughing and hacking it away. He ignored it, focusing on his work, focusing on the hole leading into the walls.

The coughing fit seized him like a garrote. His lungs refused to pump. He stumbled to his feet, away from the closet and towards fresh air. With the wine in his hand he tried to drink away the sting in his throat.

In the foyer the wine slipped from his fingers, which he realized he couldn't move. He couldn't move his eyes, as though they'd been glued in place. Feeling dripped out of his legs, and he slammed to the ground like a plank of wood.

Argus's vision faded to black as his lungs struggled to get thimbles of air. Even in the encroaching dark, the house was too bright.

*

The flood of tears he'd shed for the cruel brute surprised Nick. Even as a boy, Argus had a stern air, only seeming happy at the helm of a crowd of other boys. Command came easier to him than friends, yet he was booted from military school before graduation for losing his temper and nearly throwing another boy out a second story window.

It wasn't until Argus entered the business world that he found a jungle savage enough for his niche. There, cutting throats secured your pile of food and grew your empire. Argus had grown quite the empire, until the jungle burned down around him.

Maybe that was it: the fire hardened him like ashy wood and made him so ready to ignore Nick's warnings. No, that wasn't it. Argus was a man of control. He never believed in legends, let alone a legend that stood between him and a new empire in the making. A man who lived for controlling everything around him would never listen to a fat old lawyer. And thus it was that the old solicitor was left with nothing but dehydration to remember the last gasp of a family he'd overseen for three generations.

Cigarette smoke stung his nose and woke Nick from the reverie. Inspector Stamatopolus stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“At sunset,” Nick said across the metal table in the precinct’s interrogation room. “Around six thirty I would say. He was determined to move into the house.”

“And that’s the last place you saw him, outside the house?”

“Yes. Well, I followed him in to try and talk him out of it.”

“Talk him out of his family property?”

The words felt like having his thumb twisted. “Talk him out of a home that no one in the family seemed to want. Bad omens follow Cove House, Inspector.”

“Well they’re not likely to get any nicer. So you followed him inside and had a confrontation, is that accurate?”

“An argument, I would say. Then he led me out of the house and that was the last… that was the last time I saw Argus Buros alive.”

“Last time alive. Interesting. And after six thirty, what did you do then?”

“I had dinner at home.”

“Can your wife confirm that?”

“I live alone.”

“Well I’m sorry to hear that.” He made notes on a pad of ruled paper. “So very sorry to hear that.”

His tone made another unpleasant twist. “I’m sorry, inspector, but do you not believe what I’m telling you?”

The inspector reached inside his jacket. What police stereotype did he have now? Brass knuckles? A flask of whiskey? Instead he produced a lollipop, popping it into his mouth next to the cigarette. “I believe what you’re telling me. But I also believe what my toxicologist has to say, and they’re saying Mr. Buros’s body is showing signs that he was poisoned.”

Nick hadn’t seen the body yet. Somewhere in his mind he was hoping they would find an aneurysm or heart episode, something that was more or less beyond anyone’s control. He didn’t think his own heart could handle hearing something violent about the young man he still remembered standing next to his father's hip at age six for the annual family portrait.

“They also tell me, “Inspector Stamatopolus went on, “that there was an empty bottle of wine next to his body. Did you know about that?”

“All the members of the Buros family like a drink.”

“Before they died. All of them. Leaving no one behind to inherit the family’s means.”

“First of all,” Nick raised his hands like he was backing down from an angry dog. “The means have been gone for a very long time. That is why Argus came home in the first place. Second, the family has been visited by misfortune for years, but all of the deaths within it have been of natural causes, so I do not appreciate what you are implying.”

“And what is that?”

“You are very clearly implying that I had something to do with Argus’s death.”

“Am I? You sound like you blame yourself, at least.”

Nick ground his teeth. “May I leave, inspector, or am I under arrest?”

“No, you’re not under arrest yet. I do have one last question though, about that bottle of wine. Do you know where he got it?”

“No I don’t.”

“I’ll bet. Well I do, or at least I have a hunch. There was a box marked with Xs found open in the house. It had wine glasses, so it may well have had wine in it as well.”

“If it was a box in the house then it was put there by the movers.”

“I know that. I also know that you paid for the movers, shifting some money for Mr. Buros while he finalized the sale of his old home. And in looking at the bank account, it seems like you paid a little higher than their asking rate. Why’s that?”

“They asked me to pay higher than their asking rate. They said the house had bad air, like asbestos. It was life and limb pay.”

“Lots of life and limb going on in that house it seems. The one you’re determined to have me think is haunted.”

Nick’s fear hardened into resolve. “Those are not my words, but there is something wrong with that house. The family has known it for years, and I’ve failed to convince the last living member in the family of the danger. If you can’t see that then you won’t help me, so I’ll find out what is going on for myself.”

“If you’re concerned that we won’t find out what’s going on, let me assure you: we will. You’re excused if you’d like to leave.”

Nick barged his way out of the station. It wasn't far to barge, there were only a dozen officers on the Island of Serifos. Somehow, despite that, he’d managed to find the worst one on the entire island.

Outside, he took stock. Argus had been dead for more than twenty-four hours by the time they found him. That was all based on the state of his blood and the temperature of his body. Oddly, he’d stayed in rigor mortis far longer than a body was meant to. If the service which delivered his motorcycle from its garage in Athens hadn’t been forceful enough to make their way into the house for the delivery signature, he would still be lying there.

Serifos’s township stretched before Nick, a burg of white stone kissed by the sounds and smells of the sea. Even with all that had happened, the history of the town gripped him. Cove House, despite its curse, stretched back through the ages to the first resurgence after the diminishing of the Ancient Greek people. The island itself stretched farther than that, back to the time when Greece was all of Western Civilization. Now, all that remained of the ancient people were the lowest stones of their houses, from which stretched history and mystery alike. Maybe someday that would be all that remained of the new Greece, after its fall from grace.

“Mr. Demos?” Came a voice like a bell behind him. “Are you Nicholas Demos?” A young woman spoke to him in English. She seemed old enough to be a graduate student, and her baggy clothes and wild, curly orange hair suggested something similar to that. Her smile was welcoming enough though.

“Yes,” Nick smiled, dusting off his grasp of her language. “I am. How may I help you?”

“Actually, Mr. Demos,” she produced a business card, “I’d like to help you.”

Her card featured a symbol of an open book with an oil lamp burning nearby. Nick recognized it as a symbol for scholarship. On the back it said Celia Gilbert, Forensic Historian. “I am sorry,” he said, “I am afraid I do not understand your title.”

She beamed back at him. “Anywhere near here that we can grab a drink? I’d love to explain it to you.”

*

When they reached the café Nick ordered wine. Ms. Gilbert ordered a beer. Contrary to her offer, she did not explain her title at all. Instead she barreled into questions about what had happened to Argus. For a moment, Nick felt like he was back under the lights with Inspector Stamatopolus, though Ms. Gilbert's smile and bubbly voice were much more pleasant than the Inspector's growl.

When she’d finished listening, she took a sip of beer and replied, “I’ll be honest with you, Nick. I don’t think Argus was poisoned the way the police do.”

Regardless of the power she did or did not have with the municipality, Nick felt relief wash over him. “Thank you. It would be ridiculous for something to have happened the way that the Inspector described. Truly, I had nothing to do with this.”

“I believe you. In fact, I’m here to prove it the best I can.”

Nick sipped at his wine. “And you came all this way of your own accord just to help me?” “Actually, I came for the chance to visit Serifos.”

“You know our little island?”

“It's where Perseus slayed the Gorgons.”

He smiled again. Of course she knew the local legends. “You are partly correct. This was the kingdom of Polydectes, who bid Perseus slay the Medusa. However, she and her sisters lived a short way away, by sea. The island of—”

“Hesperides.”

It was Nick's turn to smile. “You know our country.” Argus flashed in his sight, chiding Nick for his enjoyment. “But serious business brought us together, not history. You know that the last scion of the Buros family died in the family home. Even without their money, that name is known here, and when the news breaks there will be a public outcry. The police believe he was poisoned, and they will take that information public when they try to explain what happened. My reputation is on the line, let alone my neck if the public decides that more needs to be done than shame an old man.”

She drained her beer. “Then I won't waste any more of your time: take me to the Buros house, please.”

Nick did not know Ms. Gilbert’s specialty or what it entailed, but forensic history could not be the same as criminal forensic science. She had no cause to visit that terrible house.

“Ms. Gilbert, I do not believe you understand what you are asking. We here in town call it Órmo Oíkos. Cove House. It is an uneasy place that the locals avoid. Even tourists who see it have asked to move to different guest houses and the beach where it sits is avoided by all. Many times the town has asked to tear it down, but the Buros family has resisted that every time.

“Despite that, they have never lived in the house. No one has, to my knowledge. It has spent its time as glorified storage, a stark white tool shed for the family. I visited several times with Argus's father, Adrian. I can tell you that the moment you step through the door you feel unsafe, as though the house is squeezing you. You can't draw breath, your eyes sting, and by the time you leave your body aches.

“Adrian never brought Argus there as a boy. In fact he would not let him come near it. There were provisions in place saying that for his son to go near the house it would be an offense, and he instructed me to fill him in, should the police ever catch the boy at work there. He didn't trust it, because he respected the sense of foreboding that the house had, and because his great uncle perished there suddenly during his life. But foreboding is not a sense that Argus ever shared.”

“If the family is so mistrustful of the house, why don't they do like the town wants and tear it down?”

“Families with money do not tend to let that money go, especially not by using it to tear down something else of value. Regardless of how the place makes you feel, it is truly old. The foundation is surely more than a thousand years old, and the walls date back to 1539. No one who craves status is likely to let a piece of true local history be consigned back to the earth.”

Ms. Gilbert threaded her fingers together. “Nicholas, you've convinced me that this house is something to take seriously. But, my request is the same: if you want me to help you find how Argus Buros died, take me to where it happened.

*

Night pressed on the town like a wool blanket by the time Celia convinced Nick to take her to the house. In the end, she did it by threatening to Google her way there and to go without him.

When she first saw the house, Celia commented on how white the house was and asked who maintained it. “No one,” Nick said, “not even filth will rest on those walls.”

The glaring white walls made her eyes ache, though it was night and the house was dim. Looking felt like pressing on her eyes with her thumbs.

So far, everything was as she expected when she took the assignment.

In her flashlight, the entry arch cast a long shadow inwards. Argus’s boxes sat strewn in the entryway, untouched by the police other than the remnants of fingerprint dust. In the corner were his kicked off leather loafers, hand-stitched from a brand that spoke of three dollar signs or more.

The white tile floor held the crimson wine stain, almost like blood. There was nothing wrong with that logic behind the police's theory of poison. Though they didn't have all the facts that Celia did.

Stepping through the threshold, she turned so that her back faced the open house and pulled a small makeup mirror out of her pocket. With her flashlight facing behind her, she started making her way into the house, navigating by the reflection in the mirror.

Argus died leaving the house, almost as though he was running from something, according to the police report. The scrapes on his knees would have happened when he fell forward, which made poison seem less likely, but that wasn't enough to explain how his body had seemed paralyzed after death.

What made sense there was for him to have been running from something that killed him via the paralysis.

Even with the mirror the house hurt her eyes. The whole building was soaked in harshness. Celia paused to rub at the bridge of her nose and her hand came away, crusted.

“Alright,” she said to the walls around her. “No more playing. Where are you?”

The door to the bedroom closet was partially open, likely moved that way by careful detectives who wanted to take prints from both sides of the doorknobs. She threw the door back, as though catching someone other side red handed. The open hole that Argus had mangled yawned back.

“Ah ha,” she said to the reflection in the mirror. “Bingo.” Dust swirled around her and she coughed it away. Mirror first, she went to her knees and wriggled into the hole in the wall.

Her head was barely inside when she realized she couldn't let go of the mirror. Her hands were frozen.

Panic surged and she fought against it, staring into the mirror and angling the flashlight to try and see up the dark tunnel. Her eyes strained to find some detail: a bit of skin, teeth, scales. Numbness tingled up her left arm.

“Where are you,” she shouted, coughing up more of the dust. “Where are you?”

Her toes went to sleep, just as she felt a pair of hands catch her by the ankles and haul her out of the wall. Nick, red-faced, pulled her to her feet. “Come with me,” he wheezed, “come away now.”

She tried to answer but couldn't breathe. Darkness swam at the edges of her vision until the cold night air surged into her lungs and Celia could breathe again. “It’s here,” she gasped. “It’s not just a legend. Medusa's head is here.”

*

Nick had worked with unstable people before. The behavior, the sincerity of the crazy beliefs, was a dead giveaway of mental issues. Ms. Gilbert was no exception. Though she managed to calm down as soon as they were out of the house and she was able to take deep breaths again, he couldn’t believe the look of conviction on her face as she spoke to him. The bubbly smile during their first conversation was gone, replaced with an expression he’d expect from a general on the battlefield.

“Serifos was a real place in the ancient world as much as it is now. Polydectes was a real king, and he did contract with an ancient warrior named Perseus, two thousand years before the beginning of Christianity. When my team saw the conditions behind Argus’s murder, I knew that this was the most conclusive proof we’d ever have of the Gorgons and a chance to learn more about how they lived.”

“Hold on, please,” Nick said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “You cannot be serious. I have lived here for my entire life and I am telling you that this is an ancient myth. Where could you have read that all of these people were real and that they lived here?”

“Do you know what this symbol means?” Ms. Gilbert raised her wrist and Nick saw a leather bracelet with a silver medallion, featuring the same oil lamp that her business card had featured.

“Lógios,” he said, snapping his fingers for the word. “Scholars.”

“Yes. I'm a scholar, a specific scholar dedicated to the preservation of knowledge that is on the verge of being lost. There are very old libraries all across this world, Nick. They hold knowledge that we don’t even know we’ve forgotten and can tell you more than you’d believe. My job is to help preserve what's kept in that system.”

“There is no greater library than the Internet, Ms. Gilbert. With the way things course across it do you not think someone would have discovered this before?”

“The Internet only as great as the information that’s put out there. It’s the sum total of human knowledge, but only human knowledge that people have cared about since it was invented. Every civilization stops caring at some point, and that’s when things get lost, except for a few fools who take the time to make sure that nothing more is lost than needs to be. I'm that kind of fool, and people like me are the ones who keep things like the fall of Ancient Greece from meaning Western Civilization needs to start from zero.”

“Greek knowledge survived because it was brought to the east by travelers and merchants. It survived there after the fall of Rome and was brought back to Dark Age Europe during the Crusades.”

Ms. Gilbert smiled, more with irony than play. “Someone had to carry all those heavy books and make sure they survived the trip in both directions, Nick.”

“And that someone was you?”

“Not me personally. But people like me who cared about what we've learned as a species and who will fight to make sure that what we know survives.

“Look at the facts here: a man is killed, or dies, in a house without any sign of foul play or forced entry. His body has baffled doctors because it has not abandoned rigor mortis, almost as though it was petrified. All of this takes place on an island tied to a worldwide legend about a creature that petrifies its victims. And, all of this happens in the oldest house on the island. The source of the legend must be in that house.”

Nick wanted to tell her she was insane, but the conviction in her face was as strong as the tide, and he was struggling to deny it. Regardless of the fantasy it relied on, some of what she was saying was rooted in truth. Her talk smacked of the science experiments that took place long before either of them lived, in the days of Aristotle. Back then, the nature of fire was not accurately grasped, but the logic it took to arrive at the conclusions that those ancient thinkers did was sound, at least.

“If you were correct,” he asked, “what would you do with that knowledge? All you managed to do tonight was nearly die inside that house. What happened to you? Poison? Did you hurt yourself?”

“I can’t prove what happened, but I stand by what I believe: the head of Medusa is in that house. Somehow, it must still have the same power it used to, and I was at risk for that. I need to find it and figure out what it does.”

“And what would you do if you had found it? If it still had the same power that it did in the old days? For all your talk of scholarship did you fail to account for that?”

She produced her small makeup kit with its mirror. “It’s not a polished shield from the gods, but it’s a decent looking glass from Avon. I would have tried to get close and get ahold of it, and then get it back to my people so that it could be studied and hopefully never hurt anyone again. But the mirror is looking like it's just part of the legend because whatever was in there almost got me despite not seeing anything.”

“And there you have it, Ms. Gilbert. Nothing comes from the Gods because they are myth. Medusa is myth. What even led this organization of yours to think there was something to this story?”

Ms. Gilbert produced a tablet computer and started flipping through images. “Reference to the Medusa dates back to antiquity. We don't know the date when the legend of Perseus occurred because back then oral tradition was the best we had. We know the legend exists, so that means that people back then believed in something. They were inspired by observable phenomena. I'm not saying it was magic, just that they took their best guess to explain it and arrived at magic. A giant snake, some other creature that evolution tried and failed, who knows? But the people who lived here and encountered it believed that it turned people to stone, and so they got someone to kill it. History took the rest and ran with it.

She looked up from her tablet. “Do you know what happened to Perseus after he slew Medusa?”

Nick nodded. “Everyone across the world knows the legend: he took it to Polydectes, saw that he was betrayed, slew the king's court, and threw the head into the sea. It sank to the bottom and sits there to this day, turning fish into stone.”

“Into coral, more accurately. The Greek people have a wonderful imagination for explaining the world around them, Nick. Storytellers across the globe owe them for that.”

She found the image she needed and showed it to him. It was an image of parchment or some other primitive, aged paper. There was Greek writing on it in a dialogue Nick was unfamiliar with. And up in the corner he saw a hand drawn shield crossed by a short sword. “That's the city's emblem,” he said. “What is this?”

“It's a hand-copied municipal document detailing records from the port authority in the year 1539.”

“There are no records in this city that go back so far.”

Celia's old smile returned. “Not after the fire of 1701. Isn't it good luck then, that someone had the foresight to painstakingly copy every word of it and take it to an archive elsewhere, just in case something like that should happen?”

“And those are your people, I suppose?”

“Let's just say I'm glad I wasn't doing this job in the days before document scanning. Now then, what you're seeing here is a port authority record detailing a ship that was found adrift two miles north of Solos Reef. It was a fishing ship, trawling among the coral beds, and all the men on board were found dead, and as this record states, 'as stone.' ”

Nick felt something queasy at the base of his stomach. “And you think this is proof that they found the Medusa?”

“I'm not sure, but I know it's worth checking. And after talking with you, I know something else happened in 1539.”

“Cove House was built.”

“Exactly. All the clues fit, and I'm here to see if I can find something else that fits as well. The only part of this document that my people weren't able to track down is this word here at the bottom, Daimones.”

“Oh, Daimones.”

“You know it?”

“Of course, it's a ruined neighborhood on the northern tip of the island.”

*

Ms. Gilbert's enthusiasm to visit Daimones reminded Nick more of his children when they were young and wanted ice cream than of a young professional archivist. Luckily it was a short trip, as were many places on the small island of Serifos, so they were there soon.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much to see. Daimones was a lesson that even history made of stone could crumble with time. The foundations were reduced to their lowest stones, long awaiting an archaeologist to take an interest in them. There were no great temples, however, and nothing in the one-time community of a few hundred had so far inspired scholarship. They crossed the township in a few minutes, with Ms. Gilbert respectfully keeping her distance and getting the best view she could of all the buildings.

“Can you tell me more about what used to be here?” She asked as they moved out of the ruined buildings, following the trail to the coast.

“Very little. This was a working community. I believe there were once docks and that most people who lived here were fishermen.”

“Well they wouldn't have sent a plague ship just to another fishing community. Was it dead at the time that Cove House was built?”

“No, in fact many of the laborers on the island once lived here, so I would imagine some of the builders could have lived in one of these homes.”

“Perfect. Now we're getting somewhere. What else would have come from Daimones?”

They reached the coast as Nick thought it over, following the rocky path that led around a bend and into the next bay. “I suppose timber, before the island was deforested. And some of the stone from the local quarry. And possibly—”

“Lime.”

The next bay hid a flat patch of land just above the tide level. Standing there was a pyramid of stones, thick enough to have survived the slow drip of time. The path led around to the top of the mound, where a small hole led down into the darkness, and eventually to the exit spout on the bottom.

“It's a lime kiln,” she said. “This would have been the only thing around hot enough to destroy the contents of the plague ship. They burned Medusa's head.”

*

Shortly after, they stood in front of Cove House again, each holding a sealed bag containing a section of the wall where Argus had set to work. Celia's was for her people, Nick's was for the police.

“It's in the walls,” Celia said as the two of them watched the blinding white house grab at the morning sunlight. “No, it is the walls. When I found the patch that Argus had destroyed I thought that it led to a hiding place with her head in it, but that wasn't true. The house was made using lime from that kiln where she was reduced to ash. Working on the wall stirred little bits of her into the air, and breathing them in did the same thing she did in antiquity. That killed him, and it would have killed me too if you hadn't gotten me out of there.”

She held up her piece of the plaster. “You've got your work cut out for you convincing the crime lab to take a look at this, but I'll help you if I can. They'll find enough to suggest a paralytic, and there's no way you built the house that killed your employer. I don't know if they'll be able to answer what the paralytic is, but it's still enough to clear your name.”

“How can this be?” Nick asked. “What is Medusa?”

“I don't know for sure. It's important to understand that culturally, myth is a struggle to explain what we don't understand, and the less we understand, the more creative we as a people get with it. At this point I don't think Medusa was a creature with a snake-covered head. She may have been a fungus, or something else that goes to seed, or even a stone that sloughs off in the air and behaves like poison to us. Perseus may have thought to avert his eyes by covering his face, and that was enough to keep from breathing it in.

“After Medusa's head, so to speak, was thrown into the sea, whatever quality it has that paralyzes people survived being submerged for so long. Eventually, the people who found it brought it on board. I'm guessing from our experiences, and from what happened to them, that its venom needs to be dry to work. As the seawater evaporated away, eventually it started to kill again, giving the appearance of a plague ship.

“The ship was sent to Daimones, and everything on board was carefully loaded into the lime kiln to be sterilized. The fish, the sailors' bodies, their possessions, all of that burned away. But Medusa just broke down into smaller and smaller pieces. When it came out of the kiln it was mixed right away into a lime slurry, which was wet enough to keep people safe until the house was built. Then, along comes Argus, he starts to crumble the walls, getting it all into the air, and took enough of its dust in his face to kill him.”

Nick stared at the house, defiant to the walls' glare. “Basil, the other Buros who died here, did so after starting plans to renovate for the first time in the house's history. He showed them to me and said he planned to add electric wiring and modern plumbing. I suppose that meant he was doing the same as Argus, and it killed him the same.

“All this time, they were sitting upon such danger. But I suppose this house will not accept change. Medusa was always a territorial creature in the stories.”

Celia nodded, holding up her chunk of plaster. “I have what I came here for, after a fashion. We can study this and see what there is to learn from her. At the very least I have a near death experience to tell about, even if it was from me being bull-headed.”

“What should I do with this house? None of the family lives now to claim it.”

“My recommendation? Destroy it. Very, very carefully. I'll do my job and make sure we don't forget what happened here. In the meantime, if this house stays, who knows the next time someone will be hurt by failing to understand what's inside?”

Nick agreed. “That is what I will do. One last question: these people with whom you work? Who are you really? What do you do?”

Celia's smile came back. “Only what I said: we try to ensure that all the things our ancestors gave their lives to learn stay with us, so that we don't have to learn them the hard way again. Good luck, Nick.”